Regular readers of Anne Emery’s novels featuring Halifax priest Brendan Burke and lawyer Monty Collins will know that in Postmark Berlin, Burke is coming off a very bad year.

Last seen in Though the Heavens Fall, he was in a Northern Ireland prison, having gotten mixed up in his Irish family’s complicated Republican activities during a trip there with Collins and his family. The turmoil led to some traumatizing brutalities courtesy of the alleged justice system, and a long prison sentence only overturned after several months.

Now, in 1996, he’s back home in Halifax, trying to adjust but frequently failing. In particular, never remotely a teetotaller, he’s drinking far too much far too often. Moreover, he can’t help blaming his closest friend, Collins, for a blunder that helped land him in his terrible legal trouble in Northern Ireland.

Collins and his wife and children don’t know why Burke has so sullenly withdrawn from the family he’s essentially been part of for years. Collins isn’t even aware of his part in Burke’s prison fate — but everyone connected with him knows that the priest has sunk deeply and dangerously into the drink.

It’s the boozing that leads to the events of Postmark Berlin, after the priest misses an appointment with Meika Keller, a Saint Mary’s University physics professor prominent in the community’s cultural and charitable activities. She has asked for an evening meeting to discuss some private matter, but Brennan forgets to show up, and when he’s wakened the next morning, hung over and ill, it’s to be told that her body’s been found on a beach, presumably a suicide.

Naturally, Brennan is swamped by guilt, though not ashamed enough to quit drinking. He does, though, start looking into Meika’s life and connections, hoping to discern whether she really did kill herself, or met with foul play. There’s no good answer — either way, she likely died about the time he should have been meeting her — but he’s driven toward some sort of resolution.

Shortly, it’s determined she was murdered, and though police are on the case, Burke as usual can’t forgo investigating himself — this time without the usual comradeship of Monty Collins.

What’s known of Meika is that she arrived in Canada from Germany in the days of the Berlin Wall, after barely escaping East Germany with her little daughter, who was shot and died as they ran.

In Canada, she buried her grief and moved on to teach at the university and marry the locally based commander of the Canadian naval fleet, Commodore Hubert Rendell, thereby becoming the stepmother of two now-grown children. Virtually everyone speaks highly of her and her community involvements, mainly centered on her love of music.

It’s music, though, that appears to have disrupted her life, with the brief local guest appearance of German operatic tenor Fried Habler, who evidently knew Meika Keller back in their school days in Leipzig.

Since partners are often the first suspects in a murder, the commodore comes under scrutiny. Then another man enters the picture — a man Monty Collins takes on as a client, running a sort of parallel but separate inquiry.

There are clues and suggestions about Meika’s history that eventually send the unquiet Burke off to Germany a couple of times, accompanied by his airline pilot brother. There, he learns Meika’s life story is more complicated and murky than previously known.

Back in Halifax, there is more murder — and unexpected connections between local characters and German pre-unification events — before Burke, the police, and Monty Collins figure things out.

Emery has taken to opening her novels to the wider world: he troubles in Northern Ireland last time out, the eerie secret police state of East Germany this time. Her main characters, though, have become comfortably familiar, as she and they offer up some of the horror stories of recent history in usefully entertaining fashion.